I haven’t told him about the car in the garage. My breath is ragged, my heart a frantic bird. “You’re cleaning this up, not me,” he says. I’m dropping wine glasses by the time Ben comes up from his study. When I get home, I stand in the middle of the kitchen and drop a potted fern onto the tile floor. When the engine settles down again, she says, “I shot out the windows of a cheater, but she was passionate. She revs the engine of today’s car, the Boxster, and says something I can’t hear. “I dream of you waiting outside of our house.” The next time I go to the dealership I tell his ex-wife, “He and I drink too much.” Now I sit up at night and watch TV in well-lit rooms. While I huddled alone, afraid to turn on the lights because they would show her where the windows were, I clutched the memory of those words. Through the bad time, through the broken glass, he told me that I showed him what forgiveness looked like. He is convinced that his ex-wife is hiding income from the courts so that his payments remain high. The alimony is a substantial percentage of his teacher’s salary. We are near the end of the month, and he is concerned about deposits getting made. He doesn’t care for ravioli, and tomato sauce sometimes inflames his delicate stomach. “I’m constantly surprised at what I’ll do,” he says. “You’ll let me buy it as a favor to you.” That night is Ben’s night to cook, and he reheats the untouched ravioli sauce. The monthly payments on a 911, even with my income, would cripple us. I have an ex-husband, too, but he is not part of this story. “Well, that’s your MO.” She must use something to keep her skin dewy. It’s enough to make me feel as if I’ve never been held before. The driver’s seat is tilted back so that I feel cupped. “How do you plan to explain this to Ben?” she says. When I return to the dealership, Ben’s wife shows me the 911, so beautiful I can barely speak in its presence. “That’s been happening.” I want to sleep on the couch, but he makes me come to bed with him. It’s been a long time since we had gin for dinner, and when the room spins we fall to the couch, not the bed. I hold up sauce for him to taste, and he says, “Now it doesn’t taste good.” The gin does, though. Ben comes back into the kitchen and breathes mint at me. I’ve been letting my hair go gray, and on the spot decide to start dyeing again. He pulls my head to his shoulder, using more force than he has to. He kisses me and I tell him to brush his teeth. When she eases into the driver’s seat to demonstrate the gearbox, her skirt rides up her thighs.īen comes home an hour after I do and pads around the kitchen, mixing us drinks while I boil ravioli. She doesn’t bother trying to pronounce the heavy German word correctly. Her shoes easily cost three hundred dollars. “The thing that puts Porsche ahead of its competitors is handling,” she says. Not much-I teach at the same school as Ben. And I know Ben can’t afford this,” she says. “Unless you want to buy a car, I’m not interested in talking to you. When I finally go over to the dealership, I’m just saving him time. He likes perfection, as he used to tell me on milky afternoons on the floor of his classroom, the door locked after the kids left. I also know how much he’d love a perfectly designed, perfectly functioning car. If Ben met her for the first time tomorrow, he’d find out her favorite song and be sure to get her number. Like every divorced woman, she dropped ten pounds and dyed her hair. The car makes a U-turn so tight it almost retraces its tracks, as sexy as a hand resting on the curve of a back. Sometimes I sit in the dealership parking lot and watch her demonstrate torque vectoring on the closed track. Her father had been a touring-car racer and had taught her some moves. I was thinking about his wife.Īfter she cleaned out their savings accounts, she got a job at a Porsche dealership. Since he came home to me every day, I wasn’t thinking about him all the time. Eventually we made a path, and the sex settled down. Ben and I picked our way across rubble every day. Shattered: two marriages, five childhoods, eleven windows, and one car. I lived outside city limits we heard gunshots every day, but I’d never been shot at before. Glass exploded and covered my couch or kitchen sink, and Ben’s wife stood outside of my house with a shotgun. The year was more like two years, on and off. His face tightens, but he doesn’t pretend he doesn’t know what I’m talking about, or doesn’t hear the faint yearning in my voice. NOT THINKING, I MENTION the Year of Breaking Glass in front of Ben.
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